Profile
I am a political theorist working on human needs, voice, poverty, and Marx. My first book, Marx and the Politics of Need (Routledge, 2026), re-reads Marx as a changing-making activist to develop a distinctive Marxian conception of needs as constitutively political. As of 2026, I hold a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for my project 'Unspeakable Needs: A Political Theory of Voice and Poverty', where I’m exploring the contemporary micro-politics of needs-claiming, the silencing of those in need, and discursive (in)justice. Alongside that, I think and write about the nature, purpose, and practice of public political philosophy.
Prior to joining QMUL, I was a Lecturer in Political Theory at SOAS University of London and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL. I completed my PhD at Bristol, where my research received both the Political Studies Association’s Sir Ernest Barker Prize for the best dissertation in political theory and the University of Bristol’s Hilary Hartley Prize.
Research
Research Interests:
My research draws on contemporary political theory, the philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and the work of Karl Marx to develop a political, practice-first approach to the concept of need. Where much philosophical work begins by defining a set of basic or fundamental needs, I treat needs instead as a kind of social and political claim. This shift moves the focus from what needs themselves are, to what our different needs-claims do: that is, the responses they prompt, the kinds of actions they authorise and deauthorise, the distributive decisions they justify, and the exclusions and harms they enact. On that basis, my work explores who gets empowered to make the needs-claims that count, how they become so empowered, who – by contrast – gets disempowered and silenced, and how this shapes what ultimately comes to be regarded as ‘a need’.
My published articles have made critical interventions in the contemporary philosophy of needs, as well as the politics of needs-claiming in several applied contexts, including global development, climate change, and labour markets and the workplace. My first book - Marx and the Politics of Need - presents a novel re-reading of Marx as a change-making activist in order to foreground the politics of need: the everyday practices through which needs are produced, interpreted, named, and claimed. My current Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship extends these themes to explore the politics of needs, silencing, and voice in the context of contemporary poverty. Alongside this, I also have an interest in the nature and methods of public political philosophy.
Publications
Monographs
Marx and the Politics of Need (Routledge, 2026).
Articles
‘Public political philosophy’. Public Humanities 2 (2026): e34. DOI: 10.1017/pub.2026.10122.
‘Needs, politics, and the climate crisis’. Ethics, Policy & Environment 29, no. 1 (2026): 29(1), 20–36. DOI: 10.1080/21550085.2024.2413834.
‘Political theory and the politics of need’. European Journal of Political Theory 24, no.3 (2025): 357–380. DOI: 10.1177/14748851231210779.
‘Depending on work: Human needs in the “radical turn” on workplace domination’. Critical Review of International Social & Political Philosophy, online first (2025). DOI: 10.1080/13698230.2025.2535862.
‘The theory and the politics of need: Introduction’. Critical Review of International Social & Political Philosophy, online first (2025). DOI: 10.1080/13698230.2025.2535863.
‘Politics, voice, & just transition: Who has a say in climate change decision making, and who does not’. Global Social Challenges 2, no.2 (2023): 86–104 [co-authored with Alix Dietzel, Dan Godshaw, & Alice Venn]. DOI: 10.1332/EWME8953.
‘Basic human needs: Abstraction, indeterminacy, and the political account of need’. Critical Review of International Social & Political Philosophy 26, no.7 (2023): 1140–1162. DOI: 10.1080/13698230.2021.1880199.